Israel’s Sunday papers led on Iran’s war — fought this weekend over Saudi and Jordanian ground

Saudi Arabia said two people were hurt by a projectile and a mosque damaged; the authorship is a Houthi claim, the casualties and damage a Saudi confirmation. The day before, Haaretz carried Riyadh saying its East-West oil pipeline had been struck by drones launched from Iraq — again, the attribution of origin is Saudi’s. The week behind it ran the same way. On 8-9 September Iran fired ballistic missiles at the US base at Al Azraq in Jordan in stated retaliation for American attacks on Iranian oil tankers, with Haaretz noting there was “no immediate confirmation from Jordan”; CENTCOM said early on 9 September that US forces had destroyed five Iranian crude carriers. Iranian state media and Fars reported explosions at Sirik and on Qeshm Island. At the BRICS summit in New Delhi on 12 September, President Masoud Pezeshkian said Iran “won’t surrender” to the United States and, as rendered in Haaretz’s Sunday headline, “If Americans are warriors, let them face our valiant military forces.”

What the Israeli press is actually worried about is the front that is missing from that list. Haaretz reported on 7 September that Military Intelligence “believes Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei may try to turn Israel into the next front in his escalating conflict with the U.S.” and that the IDF is preparing for a coordinated multifront attack as Israel heads toward elections in 50 days; the same piece described a surprise General Staff exercise on 6 September that included a multifront scenario. It is single-outlet, sourced to an unnamed institutional assessment, with no official on the record. The Jerusalem Post’s standing live-page furniture sets the baseline: Israel and the United States launched Operations Roaring Lion and Epic Fury on 28 February with the stated aim of creating conditions for regime change, and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was killed by an Israeli strike on a Tehran bunker. In his New Year greeting on 11 September, Netanyahu called the US-Israel alliance “stronger than ever.”

Assessment: Note where the missiles are landing. Iran is striking American infrastructure and American-aligned Gulf states, not Israel — which is consistent with a calculation that hitting Israel inside an election window hands Netanyahu the campaign he does not currently have. That makes the Military Intelligence leak worth reading as an argument as much as a forecast; it is an assessment, unattributed, arriving 50 days out. Against Netanyahu’s “stronger than ever,” the same week produced the Wall Street Journal reporting that Trump advisers expect the conflict to run through the end of his term, and the New York Times reporting that JD Vance went directly to US generals and received private assessments often different from the public rhetoric. Both are second-hand and single-sourced in the American originals.